While identifying facts and making accurate perceptions are important parts of the human function and survival, the human mind is not entirely about this or perhaps even mostly about this.

To survive and function, the human must do other things such as act and guess in ambiguous and mysterious situations. Many of these functions are not about identifying facts and assessing truth, but making speedy and practical decisions. In fact, humans are in part hard wired to make speedy intuitive decisions in the face of lack of knowledge.

As an example I use way too often, avoiding instant danger is often about how to react to the unknown and unknowable. If a mysterious large shape is moving quickly at you, taking the time to accurately identify the shape (‘gathering the facts’) is the opposite of what you need to do. Get out of the way right now, then worry about identification later. If it turns out to be nothing harmful, say just a shadow, no big deal other than you might look a bit foolish. If it turns out to be a boulder or falling board, you’ve saved yourself from harm or worse. And this is the natural and automatic subconscious self-preservation instinct of humans.

This is just one example of how truth finding is not always the priority of the mind and in fact can get inhibit function. Survival is commonly said to be about erring on the side of safety– as it takes only one time being hit by a speeding car or falling off a cliff to be dead. The key word there being ‘erring.’ In this case, the mind is designed to err.

The human mind has limited capacity and capabilities, and human function can be inhibited by too much information including facts and truths (see How Humans Use False Information and Made Up Beliefs to Produce Personal Achievement). If your task is to move across a room, trying to identify and learn the history and “truth” of everything and everyone in the would lead to you dying of old age before you reached the other side. Humans must actually block out and distort information in order to function. In order to read a complicated passage or do math, people cover their ears to block out noise or tell others around them to quit talking.

And don’t forget that humans are social animals and functioning, thriving and surviving involves interaction with people and other animals that are full of cognitive biases, delusions, limited information and viewpoints, emotions, selfish motives, social politics and order, subjective tastes and irrational drives. Humans survived and thrived as a species because they work as social groups.

Early economists made the fatal mistake of basing their models on the assumption that humans act entirely rationally when making economic decisions. Later economists realized the models had to be thrown out, because they learned that humans do not act entirely rationally when purchasing, selling, investing, valuating and saving.

In short, the commonly voiced sentiment that the human is by nature a truth seeker, and that is its key function, is highly debatable.